Curios About: Letterbox Dublin by Sarah Bracken

Letterbox Dublin
By Sarah Bracken
Street art/letters (2008-2015)

1. This work is about . . . Letterbox Dublin is an interactive street art project. It aims to add to the experience of Dublin city in a positive way, to make it an interesting place to live and visit. It aims to interact with Dubliners and visitors alike, to give them a creative outlet in a public setting and to provide a channel of anonymous expression and confession. The project documents, exhibits and publishes the letters, which are themselves valuable artefacts of the times in which they were sent.

2. I made this work because . . . I was writing my thesis on street art and experimenting with interactive art. The box was a pure experiment. The first Letterbox Dublin was handmade out of scraps of wood. It was put up in Dame Lane and a theme was placed on the box. Since then I have collected a huge archive of letters from the various letterbox themes.

3. I hope when people see this work they will . . . laugh, cry, be moved and feel connected to the letter writer.

4. In terms of art history, this work . . . is an interactive street-art project, so it is inspired by and belongs to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century street-art movement.

5. You can see my work . . . on my website here.

Curios About is a series featuring works by Dublin artists, curated for us by our friends at the Square in the Circle blog, and hosted there as well as here.

Each artist is asked to submit an image of one work and answer a set of questions about it. We’d love it if you’d submit something you’ve made.